Huawei Honor 3C Review

The Huawei Honor 3C was introduced to Malaysia just 2 month ago. With an official selling price of RM499 it has been very hot on the Malaysian Market. The Huawei Honor 3C is so high in demand, because it is not only cheap but offers remarkable hardware and specs for that price.

We have been able to create an Huawei Honor 3C Review for 2 weeks and write about how it felt in that time. Especially before the Xiaomi Redmi 1S launches, it is worth to have a look at the Honor 3C to see which one is stronger.

Lets start with the Specs:

Huawei Honor 3C Specs

• Official Price in Malaysia RM499
• Display: 5″ display panel with HD resolution of 1280×720 (294 ppi)
• MediaTek MTK6582 Cortex A7 quad core 1.3GHz processor
• 2 GB RAM
• Primary camera: Sony 8MP BSI Sensor with f/2.0 aperture and 28mm wide-angle lens
• Secondary camera: 5MP sensor with a wide-angle 22mm lens
• 8 GB flash
• 2 x micro SIM (1 x 3G WCDMA, 1 x GSM)
• Android 4.2 with Huawei’s Emotion UI – Can be updated to Android Kit Kat
• 2,300 mAh battery
• Dimensions: 139 x 70 x 9 (6 from the edges) mm
• Weight: 138 g (with battery)

Huawei Honor 3C Unboxing

Our Huawei Honor 3C came in a stylish tourqois box. The Box has a nice design and is very compact. As with other chinese manufacturers the Huawei accessoires are simple. In the box next to Honor 3C there are the charger and a quick manual.

 

Huawei Honor 3C Design

The dimesions of the Huawei smartphone are 139 x 70 x 9 mm. The backside of the 3c is slightly curved to the edges and very thin with only 6mm on both sides. The overall weight of the device is just 138g, including the battery. It seems that Huawei ensured a very well balanced phone. Through good weight distribution the Honor 3C feels very light. On top of that the 3C is very thin, so overall it has a classy feeling to it.

The Honor Battery is very small and light weight. The capacity is still at 2300 mAh which should be more then enough for a full day of usage.

The Honor 3C comes also with Dual Sim and Micro SD support. The dual micro sim and micro sd slots are placed at an right angle to the battery

One interesting fact is, that there is no Huawei Logo on the Smartphone itself. The Phone is branded just with “Honor” on the back side. It seems that similiar to Lenovo Malaysia with their “Vibe” Brand, that Huawei Malaysia wants to create a Sub Brand with the Honor Line. We can find the Huawei Logo only on the charger. On the back cover you find one speaker at the bottom. Camera and LED are on top center.

All the buttons and volume rocket are placed on the right site of the Honor 3C. On the left side there are no buttons.

The bottom of this Huawei Smartphone has the familiar Android Layout. Three Normal Android buttons, back, home and context. They are placed from left to right, so the order is a bit different then we were used to from other Android Smartphones. The touch buttons are not lit, which would have been a nice gimmick from Huawei.

The Top of the device has secondary camera, call speakers and a proximity sensor.

The Huawei Honor 3C has also a notification LED in multiple colors. This LED is right next to the call speaker and notifies for incoming calls and messages.

Huawei Honor 3C vs Samsung Galaxy S3. The Honor 3C is slightly larger then th Samsung Galaxy S3.

 

Huawei Honor 3C Display Review

The Huawei Honor 3C sports a 5-inch LTPS display with HD resolution of 1280×720. We think the display of the Honor is large and features very good and clear images. It displays wide viewing angles and vibrant colors.

The pixel density of the Honor 3C is 294 ppi, same with the Xiaomi Redmi 1S. In our Honor 3C review the 294ppi is enough for normal every day usage. Yet, smaller text might look a bit soft, especially compared with smartphones that have higher pixel density.

Huawei Honor 3C Software – Android 4.4

The Honor 3C that we used for our Review had Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) pre installed. It is running very quickly and gives smooth operating of the phones. While for the last two month Android 4.2.2 was the highest Version possible on Mediatek powered mobiles, we have good news.

Huawei brought our a update this week. Finally the Honor 3C will get Android 4.4. Huawei released the version H30-U10 of their Emotion UI for the Huawei Honor 3C smartphone. As well they brought some more changes to the Custom Rom. Android 4.4 Kit Kat is definitely the biggest change.

You can download the ROM on Huawei’s EMUI.com Chinese Homepage. The Download Links are very clearly shown.

The Version we had in our Huawei Honor 3C Review was still Android Jelly Bean with Emotion UI 2.0

We liked the Emotion UI feeling. The Emotion UI 2.0 runs very smooth and is well designed. On our version there were barely lags and the UI is generally responsive and fast. Similiar to Xiaomi’s MIUI, the ROM has a a lot of themes. Users can even submit their own generated themes, and Huawei will feature them in the repository. Of course Huawei offers a lot of themes themselves for Emotion UO on the Honor 3C.

Especially in comparison with Xiaomi, Huawei has always been strong on connection. For the Honor 3C they have been really putting in effort for the Huawei DLNA feature. The mobile can both be DNLA server and player. The Honor 3C can detect servers in the WIFI network, and users can stream content from them.

Native Apps like Sound Recorder, Calculator, Weather App and Flash Light worked all without problems in our Huawei Honor 3C Review. The music player can even show cover arts, but only if the data is embedded in the music files. Xiaomi’s MIUI music player can fetch these cover arts from the internet, based on music and artist.

Huawei Honor 3C FM Radio

The FM radio showed really good connection in our test. You can use it easily on your way to work. Even after using the radio a few hours in our test the battery looses only very few percentage points.

The Huawei Honor 3C comes even with a special driving mode. On our version the Driving mode was only supported in chinese though.

Huawei Honor 3C Review – Power Management

Huawei has really optimized the Power Consumption of the Honor 3C. The user gets a lot of customized options to minimize the batter usage with Emotion UI. The Honor 3C even informs the user if there are power intensive apps running. On demand the phone shows the power consumption of those apps in mAh.

Huawei Cloud Services also exist. Also we are not sure how fast they are if you access them via Malaysia, since the servers are probably in China. We did not try in our Huawei Honor 3C review.

Huawei Honor 3C Battery Life

The Honor 3C comes with 2300 mAh battery. The battery life of the Honor Mobile is impressive. In our review the battery was still at 60% at 10pm, even after very heavy usage. We chatted on Facebook and Whatsapp, took photos and calls, browsed the internet intensively with 3G and Wifi. Normally with this usage Samsung Galaxy and also Apple Phones would have died already. The Huawei Honor 3C showed still 60% at 10pm in our Review. Finally Huawei is doing it right!

Mediatek Chipset GPS issue

There is a very well known issue with Mediatek processors. Normally it takes much more time then on other chipsets to get the correct location set on your smartphone via GPS satellites. There is a very popular fix to correct this issue on Mediatek Mobiles. In our Honor 3C review we did not encounter this problem though. We got the GPS Status in about 30 seconds which should be fast enough for every day users.

Huawei Honor 3C Benchmarks and Antutu Scores.

TO boot the device up, from starting cold to fully loaded it takes maximum 20 seconds. After 20seconds you get a fully loaded and responsive Emotion UI, which is quite a good response time.

The Honor 3C runs on Mediatek Quad Core Processor and 1.3 GHZ and 2GB of Ram. In our review the Huawei Honor 3C Antutu Score was 17,130 points. This score is very similiar to the antutu benchmark of an Samsung Galaxy S3. The Galaxy S3 runs on Quadcore Snapdragon S400 1.5 Ghz and either 1GB or 2GB of Ram. For this pricing difference, this is a very reputable benchmark for the Honor Mobile.

We could not see anything special about the charging time. It took 1 1/2 hours to charge the phone from 39 percent to 98 percent.

Huawei Honor 3C Review – Camera

The Camera comes with an large aperture of f/2.0 which is why we expected high quality pictures. Large aperture mean high quality pictures in low light. Also we should get excellent bokeh for macro shots, while the object in the foreground is sharp, the background blurrys slightly.

The Maximum resolution of the 4:3 pics is 2560 x 1920 and the 16:9 pics have a 2560 x 1440 maximum resolution. Huawei achieves the 16:9 ratio by cutting the 4:3 pic from top and bottom, and loosing some pixel in the process. The 16:9 pics have 3.7 million pixels via 4.9 million pixels on the 4:3 pics.

What is not quite understandble is that all camera sensors still have 4:3 aspect ratio. Nobody uses 4:3 on Tv’s and Monitors anymore these days. Huawei gives the maximum Megapixel of the Rear Camera at 8MP. In our Huawei Honor 3C review we could only use 5 MP maximum though. Does anyone know why that is?

Camera Software

We did not like the Huawei camera app. It seems to be very useless because in most cases it crashed if we took a picture before the app saves it. On top of that all the features are very basic. No matter which aspect ratio you choose, the preview will only display 4:3. The Video mode is good though. We hope Huawei fixed those issues with the newest update.

In this Huawei Honor 3C Review we found another Photo App preinstalled though. ProCapture App is very very powerful and has a lot of customization options and tweaks included. The user can easily adjust exposure levels, macro focus, night shots and white levels. All pictures we took for this Huawei Honor 3C review are made with the ProCapture App.

Normal Shots

In normal lightning the camera performs very good. We expected nothing less. With optimal lighting the camera performs perfectly, as expected.

Pictures in Macro Mode

The Honor 3C pictures in Macro mode were excellent. The 3C can focus very closely, much closer then other mobiles we tested so far.

Pictures with High Contrast – High Contrast Conditions

 

High contrast pictures are very difficult for every camera and optics. Often important areas in the pictures become over or under exposed. In our test for example the fur of the cat is overexposed while the bird is evenly exposed.

HDR Mode

HDR mode takes multiple pictures with different shutter speeds, normally 2-3. Afterwards the optimal exposured areas are combined into one picture. It also saturates pictures, makig the colors more vivid. Personally we like the HDR mode a lot and use it often. The HDR mode on the Huawei Honor 3C worked definitely well in this Review.

Difficult Low Light Conditions on the Honor 3C Malaysia

With a few exceptions all modern smartphones take good pictures – when the light conditions are right. To judge the real quality of the Huawei Honor 3C cam we took some pictures under low light conditions. As you can see in our review low light pictures there is at least some noise in them. Aperture of f/2.0 means that the hole in the sensor through which the light passes is relatively large and will give better light then a smaller one.

We are happy with the Huawei Honor 3C in difficult light conditions.

Huawei Honor 3C Malaysia Plus and Minus

Plus Points:

• Excellent Price at RM499
• Both Cameras, Rear and Front are of very high quality
• Large and colorful display which shows great colors and good viewing angles
• Excellent Battery Life
• Beautiful and smooth Custom Rom at Emotion UI
• Android Kit Kat 4.4
• VERY good value for the Price

Minus:

• Pretty large, maybe hard to navigate with one hand
• Not the highest pixel density, so softer text as usual
• Huawei Camera App useless (hopefully updated now)
• The plastic body could be more robust
• Scarcity of Stock in Malaysia

The Huawei Honor 3C in this Review was provided by Lazada Malaysia.

Summary of our Huawei Honor 3C Review:

The Huawei Honor 3C is one of the hottest selling Android Smartphones in China. And that is with good reason. Next to the very hot Price Tag, it operates smoothly and can be compared to the performance of the Galaxy S3. Especially the High Quality Cameras surprised us. The Battery Life is also exceptional.

If you are looking for an Budget Smartphone under RM500 we can definitely recommend the Huawei Honor 3C after this review.

 Thanks to Lazada Malaysia for giving us the Huawei Honor 3C Model to test for two weeks !